Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, sat down for an editorial board meeting with the Financial Post..

On Canada's download caps:

“It’s a deterrent to Canadian society that exists nowhere else in the world. In Britain, everything is uncapped,” he told the Post. “In the U.S., on Comcast for $45 a month [you get] 300 gigabytes and then [each extra] 10 gigabytes is like a dollar.”

On the future of apps:

"It will be completely compatible to have a Netflix app, to have a Rogers app, to have a movie channel app, to have YouTube as an app," he said.

"Because in the broadest sense, we compete for relaxation time. … You go home, the kids are in bed, you want to watch something to relax, you've got many choices."....

Measurement firm Nielsen has begun tracking the viewing habits of some 5 million American households that receive entertainment on Internet-connected devices and television sets.

Measurement firm Nielsen has begun tracking the viewing habits of some 5 million American households that receive entertainment on Internet-connected devices and television sets.

It's a group Nielsen dubs the "Zero TV" households, though that fails to precisely describe this group of viewers who are mainly younger than age 35 and childless. The vast majority -- some 75% -- own at least one television, but these sets are connected to the Internet, not to a cable or satellite service.

These nontraditional TV viewers surveyed as part of the latest Cross-Platform Report from Nielsen cited cost and lack of interest as the main reasons for not subscribing to a traditional pay TV service.

It remains to be seen whether this group, referred to by some industry observers as the "never-connecteds," will forgo cable or satellite subscriptions as they age, buy homes and raise families.

"You do have to sit back and say, 'Is it a life stage? You're younger, you don't quite have the economic means. Does this mean you'll never get that traditional pipeline to content?' " said Dounia Turrill, senior vice president of insights at Nielsen Co. "That's a longitudinal look that we need to be aware of and we'll keep an eye on."

Nearly half of the "Zero TV" homes -- 48% -- watch TV shows through online subscription services like Netflix, Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime. More than two-thirds say they get their video on a constellation of devices that include their computers, Internet-connected TVs, smartphones and tablets, Nielsen found.

Nielsen said last month that it would expand its definition of "television" households to reflect the new ways consumers get their entertainment, including measuring viewing on Internet-connected TVs in the home.

"Evolving the definition of the traditional television household is really critical at this juncture with the proliferation of content that is delivered to the home in different ways," Turrill said.

This isn't just about movies but also your average television show. I personally watch television online only. So this is a growing segment of people watching media as it has been for the past five years. Interesting!

The company that measures television viewership said Thursday it will soon begin counting people who watch programming through broadband in addition to the traditional broadcast or cable hook-up.

Nielsen’s move is a significant step toward recognizing a world where the definition of TV viewing is swiftly changing and toward satisfying clients concerned that the company isn’t keeping up with those changes. Separately, Nielsen is developing ways to track content on tablets and mobile phones.

For many years, roughly 99 percent of homes in the U.S. had televisions that received service through broadcast, cable or satellite signals.

Now the number of homes without such service is 4.2 percent – and growing each year. About three-quarters of those homes still have TVs, however, and their owners watch programming through game consoles or services like Netflix and Amazon. Starting September, Nielsen will have meters that can monitor viewership in those homes, said Brian Fuhrer, a senior vice president at Nielsen.

This will add roughly 160 homes to Nielsen’s current sample of 23,000 houses nationwide with meters monitoring viewing habits.

More significantly, Nielsen will return to its sample to find homes that have cable or broadcast, but also separate TV sets hooked up through broadband. This will add an estimated 2,000 more broadband sets, significantly increasing the sample size, Fuhrer said.

“Consumers are accessing content in new ways that fall outside of our traditional definitions and if we don’t expand … we could be missing an emerging trend,” he said.

Under Nielsen’s old definition, there are an estimated 5 million homes in the U.S. without working TV sets, up a total of 3 million from 2007. Nielsen and the industry studied this to see whether people were pulling their plugs because of the recession; instead, the bulk of the new “non-TV homes” were simply watching TV in a different way.

It feels like forever since we've had a good old-fashioned tech rivalry. The "I'm a Mac" commercials pitting cool Apple guy against dorky Microsoft man stopped airing in 2010.

Could Amazon vs. Netflix be the next feud to inspire us? That's the conclusion we came to after reading David Carr's piece in the New York Times Tuesday. Carr points out that Netflix and Amazon's streaming service Amazon Prime are both ramping up the creation of original content to further drive people away from their TVs and the TV networks.

Netflix was the first to produce original content with the Kevin Spacey drama "House Of Cards," now the site's most-watched show. Amazon is following suit and is reportedly producing 11 original shows for Prime.

Netflix currently has 33 million customers across the world. Amazon is less open about their numbers, but as of February 2012 there were between 3 and 5 million Amazon Prime subscribers.

Amazon clearly doesn't have Netflix's numbers, but Amazon Prime (like Hulu Plus) has current television shows (you'll have to pay extra to view them). Without the new TV shows, Amazon Prime is a better value. Unlimited Netflix streaming costs $7.99 a month. Amazon Prime costs $79 a year, which comes out to $6.58 a month and includes free two-day shipping on most Amazon items.

Traditional Hollywood studios now compete with streaming content providers like Netflix and Amazon to capture viewers' attention. Hari Sreenivasan looks at the growing impact of broadband and its effect on our viewing habits and entertainment industry with Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Lisa Donovan of Maker Studios.

Click headline to read the transcript or watch video of the NewsHour segment--

Some argue that readers no longer want curated content, however we believe people always have and always will look to trusted sources for guidance, and that’s where books and magazines will continue to add value.

Walt Disney Imagineering has been using the Disney theme parks and resorts as centers for innovation in storytelling for decades, finding interesting ways to create...

While the opportunity to collaborate with Disney Imagineering to realize your dream project is compelling, it’s important to be familiar with the terms and conditions that come attached to the application. While all applicants retain full ownership of their intellectual property, all submissions should be considered public and non-confidential, and applicants grant WDI “a fully paid-up, transferable, non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free license” to their submissions, along with the right to sub-license the work to third parties. When asked for clarification on the terms, Trowbridge explained that “given that we are engaging [the] artists with the intent to produce their proposal, we must be granted the rights to do so, or in other words, a license to use their creative work, which must be transferable and perpetual.” Trowbridge stressed that WDI R&D would work with artists whose proposals were selected to set up an agreement and working relationship to develop the proposal through to complete concept and potential production.

You might think that with only 140 characters available, you can’t say much on Twitter – a very, very short story, you might think, but that’s not the case. Those 140 characters can be put to very effective uses, when you tell the right story, the right way.

Twitter doesn’t allow you to get into the nitty-gritty of your company’s past, or to delve too deeply into company mission statements or policies. It’s too immediate, too terse for that. But it does open up possibilities for other kind of storytelling that you may not have thought of. Let’s look at some of those.

Natan Edelsburg: "In a very unique interview with STARZ, SVP of Consumer Marketing Kelly Bumann share details and insights on how the Denver-based network leveraged Facebook (they premiered the pilot episode on Facebook), Twitter, GetGlue, message boards and dedicated fan-sites and communities to help share their original programming with new users and reward passionate fans" ...

At last we have started our new project based on animated scenes. But we realy want to transform it into a transmedia reality. Now i trying to find some references about this new style of storytelling. Here is one realy good presentation

In the television pilot that Cheyenne Jackson taped recently, he played an aggressive young news anchor whose ascendancy threatened an older colleague. It was a fitting metaphor for the industry itself, because while Mr. Jackson had taped pilots for ABC, NBC and USA before, this was his first time doing one for a new challenger to those alphabet networks: Amazon.com.

When Amazon sizes up the television marketplace, it sees opportunity. Internet-delivered TV, which until recently was unready for prime time, is the new front in the war for Americans’ attention spans. Netflix is following up on the $100 million drama “House of Cards” with four more series this year. Microsoft is producing programming for the Xbox video game console with the help of a former CBS president. Other companies, from AOL to Sony to Twitter, are likely to follow.

The companies are, in effect, creating new networks for television through broadband pipes and also giving rise to new rivalries — among one another, as between Amazon and Netflix, and with the big but vulnerable broadcast networks as well.

“These are the very first lab tests in a very grand experiment,” said Jeff Berman, the president of BermanBraun, a media company that makes programming for NBC, HGTV, AOL and YouTube, among others.

On February 7, the fourth season of Community kicked off on NBC. It was something of a shock that the show had survived for so long. It ranked 193rd among broadcast shows. In May 2012, series creator and showrunner Dan Harmon had been unceremoniously canned. And on the night it aired, the season premiere pulled in just 4 million viewers. That’s a mere quarter of the audience enjoyed by ratings juggernauts like Two and a Half Men or The Big Bang Theory. It even underperformed a rerun of the ABC reality show Shark Tankon the Nielsen charts.

Until recently, those 4 million viewers would have been the end of the story. Just a few years ago, similar niche favorites like Jericho and Firefly were summarily executed for such numbers. In fact, cult legend Freaks and Geeks averaged nearly 7 million viewers in its single, 1999-2000 season before getting canceled. But that night in February, Community accomplished something that none of those shows ever had the chance to do—it spawned two worldwide trending topics on Twitter.

All of your favorite shows are ratings dogs. Breaking Bad, Girls, Mad Men—each struggles to get a Nielsen score higher than 3, representing about 8.7 million viewers. And it’s not just cable. NBC’s 30 Rock struggled to top a score of 2.5, and Parks and Recreation rarely cracks Nielsen’s top 25. There are two possible conclusions to draw from these facts: (1) All these shows should be canceled, or (2) maybe the ratings are measuring the wrong thing. Since the 1970s, television has been ruled by the Nielsen Family—25,000 households whose TV habits collectively provide a statistical snapshot of a nation’s viewing behavior.

Over the years, the Nielsen rating has been tweaked, but it still serves one fundamental purpose: to gauge how many people are watching a given show on a conventional television set. But that’s not how we watch any more. Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet—none of these platforms or devices are reflected in the Nielsen rating. (In February Nielsen announced that this fall it would finally begin including Internet streaming to TV sets in its ratings.)

Following its recent collaboration with digital music distribution service Zimbalam, BlackBerry has bolstered its content offering on the BlackBerry World storefront today by partnering with a trio of new TV networks and production companies.

In other words, the Second Screen has arrived, but the revolution awaits us. In 2013, brands, media companies and marketers are going to get far more aggressive and inventive when it comes to second-screen engagement. During a recent panel I moderated for Viacom’s integrated marketing group, Mondelez’s (a Kraft spinoff) VP of Global Media Bonin Bough reported engagement is far stronger for second-screen integrated marketing programs than for traditional online brand advertising (read “banners”).

Social Shares is the New SEO. Sure, links let the bots know there are other sites (authors) who find your content useful but when someone publically "shares" your content with their social connections, this social signals evokes trust in the author's content and authority.

Ahead of its final season of flagship show Spartacus, Starz is trying something new: a vast suite of second-screen applications called The Battle for Nuceria—social-media based mini-games, content starring the show's actors, and "missions" that take the player all over the show's ancient-world setting. But it's the show's final season."I think, one, regardless of it being the last season, we want to reward the fans," said Kelly Bumann, svp of digital marketing for the network.

It's another example of a brand becoming a digital publisher – using the tools of digital publishing and social media to speak directly to consumers. Who needs to have your press releases or public statements misrepresented ...

Colin Marshall: "With as much vehemence as Godard has aired his grievances about how the forces of story, plot, and narrative hopelessly and perversely distort artistic truth, Burns declares his acceptance and even admiration of that element of storytelling."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.